Yang Sheng says the farsighted plan demonstrates elevated sophistication, strategic adeptness, and pragmatism

The structural differences between the third Five-Year Plan (2026-30) and the previous two long-term socioeconomic development blueprints of the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR) embody growing governance sophistication, strategic adeptness, and pragmatism.

The new blueprint marks a noticeable shift from its predecessors.

The first plan (2016-20) established baseline goals. It served as a baseline strategy to introduce long-term macroplanning to the MSAR, with an overarching objective of laying down generalized economic foundations and setting up the foundational institutional framework needed to steadily transition the region into a “world center of tourism and leisure”.

The second blueprint (2021-25) conceptualized the “1+4” diversification model, identifying finance; technology; health; and meetings, incentives, and conventions and exhibitions as the four subsectors that Macao wanted to build to reduce the city’s reliance on the gaming sector.

Rather than merely outlining conceptual goals, the third development blueprint leapfrogs the stage of exploratory road maps toward more concrete, target-driven implementation, providing an operational master plan for advancing the MSAR’s “1+4” economic diversification, with a key focus on furthering cross-border and economic integration in alignment with the national 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-30).

The latest plan bridges long-term vision with hard, actionable infrastructure. It is transitioning from policy theory to bricks-and-mortar execution. It explicitly anchors diversification onto four massive physical engineering projects set for phased completion by 2030: the Macao-Hengqin International Education City, the Macao Technology Research Industrial Park, the Macao International Integrated Tourism and Cultural Zone, and the Macao International Airport Hengqin Cargo Terminal.

This transition underscores the MSAR government’s growing governance sophistication, having felt its way over the past two five-year-plan periods. It also reflects the government’s strategic adeptness in response to the national strategies under the 15th Five-Year Plan. The development of the Macao-Hengqin International Education City and the Macao Technology Research Industrial Park dovetails with the national strategy of promoting high quality productive forces and achieving technological self-reliance. The Macao International Integrated Tourism and Cultural Zone and the Macao International Airport Hengqin Cargo Terminal will facilitate further economic integration within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The early plans treated cooperation with Hengqin and Chinese-mainland partner cities in the Greater Bay Area primarily as Macao’s geographical expansion and external tourism collaboration. The new blueprint seeks to implement deep institutional alignment through the “Macao + Hengqin” single-entity positioning, a strategic joint-branding and operational framework that treats Macao and the neighboring Hengqin In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Zhuhai as a single, unified market and destination. Instead of operating as two separate jurisdictions under different systems, the “Macao+Hengqin” single-entity positioning pools the complementary strengths of the two places together and pitches them to global investors and businesses as a seamless economic ecosystem in attracting foreign direct investment. This puts the theoretical concept of achieving “institutional alignment across the Greater Bay Area”, which has been much talked about, into practice.

Under the “single-entity positioning” framework, Macao acts as the international gateway, offering an open free-port economy with a low tax system and deep ties to global markets — especially Portuguese-speaking countries and regions; Hengqin offers vast space, industrial land, and integration into the mainland’s supply chains and domestic market. Of course, building this framework is a multistage process that is continuously scaling up.

Without an effective governance system, the blueprint would remain just so much paper. However, this apparently has been given considerable thought during the process of the plan formulation. Public-administration reform is explicitly proposed as one of the twin foundational pillars of the third Five-Year Plan, positioning the elevation of governing capacity alongside economic diversification as the core drivers for the MSAR’s future.

The administration reform is mapped out via several structural changes:

The blueprint mandates the prioritization of restructuring the Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau to remove overlapping duties and solidify its authority over civil service management. This is to enhance overall governance efficiency and ensure a results-oriented administration, complementing previously implemented government restructuring and streamlining measures such as cutting down multiple bureau-level bodies, shrinking redundant leadership positions, and reducing the overall civil service headcount.

The plan pushes for a “collaborative governance” mechanism, a framework that builds direct coordination channels between disconnected departments to stop them from passing the buck on large public projects. It loops judiciary modernization into public reform, seeking to enhance legal procedures to ensure governance operates with speed and according to modern standards.

The plan also aims to revamp the ranking, evaluation, and promotion systems for civil servants, and encourage job rotation across different fields and bureaus to prevent administrative stagnation. Digitalization will also be promoted to boost administrative efficiency, seeking to replace outdated administrative paperwork models with advanced e-government tools; for example, promoting the use of artificial intelligence and automated risk-assessment technologies to fast-track municipal and corporate approval procedures.

The core principle for public administration reform is to consolidate the executive-led governance system, which is the vehicle through which Macao will break through deep-rooted contradictions and economic bottlenecks. The executive-led system under the third Five-Year Plan will focus on “constructive interaction”. The executive branch exercises the political lead, while the legislature provides high-efficiency legislative support, ensuring policy packages such as legal reforms and other initiatives are codified without bureaucratic gridlock.

All in all, the new blueprint demonstrates elevated governance sophistication, strategic adeptness, and pragmatism. Coupled with an enhanced executive-led governance model, these will ensure that the MSAR’s socioeconomic development aligns with the overall national development under the 15th Five-Year Plan and goes a long way toward making the region’s development goals a reality.

The author is a current-affairs commentator.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.